‘I was always innocent.’
A baby has started crying further along the row of visitors. The young mother unbuttons one side of her blouse and starts to breastfeed, but the guards tell her that she’ll have to feed her baby elsewhere. Grudgingly, she says goodbye and carries the infant to the waiting room or the public toilet or the broiling heat of her car.
‘Ever think you’ll have kids?’ Audie asks.
‘I like making ’em,’ replies Moss, ‘but I’d be a bit scared of raising ’em. It’s not like I’ve set a good example.’
‘You’d be a good father,’ says Audie. ‘Better than most.’ He pauses to clear his throat. ‘I haven’t had a chance to thank you for what you did.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘You know what I mean. All my life people have been putting themselves out for me and I don’t know what I ever did to deserve saving.’
‘You did plenty,’ says Moss, leaning forward, a moist sheen making his eyes shine. ‘I remember when you first arrived. You didn’t look like much. We took bets on how long you’d survive.’
‘Did you have money on me?’
‘You cost me twenty bucks and two Mars bars. Nobody knew what you were capable of, but you showed ’em.’
Audie draws a deep breath. ‘I didn’t set out to—’
‘Let me finish,’ says Moss, squeezing his eyes shut. ‘You know what it’s like in this place – every day’s a test. The monotony. The violence. The misery. The loneliness. It builds up inside a man’s chest like a scream. Sure you hear the occasional joke or get a food parcel or a letter or a visitor – things that make life bearable for a few hours – but that ain’t enough. Then you came along, Audie. I know you didn’t set out to be noble or honourable, but that’s the strange truth of it. Terrible things happened to you. You fought and couldn’t stop it, but you rose above. You gave us somebody to look up to. We were weak men, treated like animals, but you proved to us that we could be more.’
Audie tries to swallow the lump in his throat and is grateful when Desiree appears in the visitor’s room, ignoring the whistles and catcalls of the prisoners as she passes their windows. She picks up the second phone.
‘You look like you’ve grown taller,’ says Moss.
‘And you’re fatter than I remember.’
Moss sucks in his stomach. ‘Must be all the fine cuisine we get in here.’
Audie offers his chair to Desiree. ‘You can stay,’ she says.
‘No, I’m going to stretch my legs.’ He glances around nervously. ‘I keep thinking they’re going to realise they’ve made a mistake and lock me up again.’
‘Nobody is going to lock you up.’
‘All the same.’
Audie spreads out his right palm and places it on the Perspex screen, waiting for Moss to do the same until their fingers match up on either side.
‘You stay safe, big fella. Say hi to Crystal for me.’
‘I will.’
Audie walks along the windows, noticing how some of the visitors turn and stare at him. He hears chairs being pushed back and the sound of someone clapping their hands together. Turning, he glimpses Junebug on his feet behind the window. Klutz is at the next, then Sandals and Bowen and Little Larry and Shoats. They stand and applaud, hard men serving hard time, and the sound begins spreading like a wave through Three Rivers, reaching distant cells where inmates bang cans against the bars and stamp their feet and chant Audie’s name, which resounds in his ears and blurs his vision on the short walk, which has taken him eleven years to make.
The sky is clear blue, combed through with clouds that look like seed balls ready to scatter in the first gust of wind. But there’s not a breath of it and barely a sound except for the traffic noise and the birds in the trees. Audie steps out of the car, feeling the heat radiating from the asphalt. A cemetery spreads out ahead of him with thousands of headstones, dotted in neat rows like baby teeth with gaps in between filled with flowers instead of gold.
Sandy Valdez gets out of the driver’s seat and waits for Max to join her.
‘Do you want to do this alone?’ she asks.
‘No,’ says Audie, looking at Max.
‘I’ll wait here,’ she says, squeezing Max’s hand.
They walk beneath the trees, staying in the shade, until they reach a corner of the cemetery where the lawns are less kempt and a wire fence flanks a four-lane road. The clearing is dotted with small mounds of soil. Audie consults a map that was given to him by the Dreyfus County Coroner’s office.
‘This is the place,’ he says. There are no headstones. No flowers. The only markers are a dozen square metal plates that are stuck on spikes into the earth, almost hidden by weeds. Each one is stencilled with a number. Audie has to search for the right one. He finds it: UJD-02052004. Kneeling down, he begins to pull weeds from around the marker. He should have brought flowers. On a nearby grave, a jam jar contains the remnants of perished blooms. Audie tosses the dead stalks aside and polishes the jar on his shirt. He begins picking at the scrawny daises that have avoided the mower by growing close to the fence.
Max joins him, and soon they have a small collection in the makeshift vase. Using just his good hand, Audie digs his fingers into the soil, half burying the jar so it doesn’t topple over. He had wanted to give Belita so much, but this is all she has – an unmarked grave, a stencilled number, daisies in a jam jar.
‘I’m sorry we couldn’t come sooner,’ he whispers, imagining her lying beneath him, her head on a pillow. ‘They’re your favourite flower, remember?’
Audie glances up at Max. ‘I brought Miguel.’ Max looks embarrassed and unsure of what to do. Should he kneel down? Should he say a prayer?
‘He saved me from drowning,’ says Audie, still talking to Belita. ‘It must run in the family.’ He begins telling her the story, explaining how Max had swum Audie to shore and dragged him onto the beach as police cruisers arrived and a helicopter hovered overhead. Audie was barely conscious but can remember the bright lights and people yelling. Moss was ordering others around and standing over Audie as though keeping guard.
It was eighteen hours before Audie next opened his eyes. He was lying in the hospital with his arm in a sling and Special Agent Desiree Furness beside his bed.
‘How can one man be so unlucky and so lucky?’ she asked.
‘I guess I broke a mirror and found a horseshoe on the same day,’ he said, floating on painkillers.
It was Desiree who found Belita. Dreyfus County had a special corner of a cemetery set aside for bodies that were unclaimed or unidentified.
‘Why is there no headstone?’ asks Max, wiping the sweat from his top lip.
‘Nobody knew her name except me … and I couldn’t tell them,’ replies Audie, rubbing his dirty hands on his jeans.
‘Are you gonna say a prayer?’
‘I don’t really know how to.’
‘I’ll do it,’ says Max, kneeling next to him and making the sign of the cross. He asks the Lord to bless Belita and keep watch over those who loved her. Audie says amen, his heart caught somewhere between his diaphragm and his throat. He looks at the barren square of earth and knows that it will never be big enough to hold the history buried beneath.
We get given our faces, thinks Audie, but we inherit our lives, our happiness and our unhappiness. Some get a lot, some get a little. Some savour every morsel and suck the marrow out of every bone. We take pleasure in the sound of rain, the smell of cut grass, the smiles of strangers, the feeling of dawn on a hot day. We learn things and realise we can never know more than we don’t know. We catch love like a cold and cling to it like wreckage in a storm.
‘We should get her a proper headstone,’ says Max, helping Audie to stand. ‘What do you think it should say?’
Audie ponders this for a moment and realises that he’s always known the epitaph: ‘Life is short. Love is vast. Live like there’s no tomorrow.’
sp; Michael Robotham, Life or Death
Life or Death Page 37